Janus
by ForbiddenDreams13
Summary: She can pretend to love him. After all, it's the closest she'll ever get to the one who really stole her heart, or rather corrupted it. KuramaxBotanxKarasu


**Hello readers, and welcome to a brand new oneshot!**

 **Author's notes: Another KarasuxBotanxKurama dynamic. I've fallen quite in love with these as of late. The way is fluctuates is similar to watching the erratic pulse of a purple light-it skitters up the walls like a neurotic rat, yet has all the grace of a bird in flight- like a ballerina trying to dance on an electrically charged floor.**

 **Please pardon the dark analogies. I've been listening to Markiplier play Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. I've also been reading a lot of Ray Bradbury.**

 **Please read and enjoy!**

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A bright flash of scarlet dances about in the corner of her vision while a voice as soft as downy feathers rides the gentle breeze up into her ear. Botan turns toward the source of the flash and the voice. Kurama sits beside her, commenting on the pleasant weather. Smiling, Botan responds, inquiring about the well-being of him and his family. He answers her questions, and a conversation begins to stir, blinking sleep from its eyes and lumbering down the track laid out by their earlier words. Like twin emerald crystals, his eyes glimmer with mirth as he recounts an amusing tale from earlier in the week. She listens, watching his lips wrap around each word, twin pink velvet ribbons entwining around ethereal boxes of sound.

A beam of sunlight shoots out from behind a cloud, a golden javelin of light vaulting from the sky, it scores a direct hit on the fox demon. Hair blazing crimson fire while soft skin glows like a perfectly ripened peach, suffused with the blood-tint of the love he feels for her.

How beautiful he is, she thinks. How lucky she is, to have this coveted crimson angel for her own. For never in a million years would she have imagined herself to be sitting here, in this park with him at her side.

And yet…how utterly vile it all is.

Yes. How vile, how repugnant that she play complacent host to the ivory-coated parasite that slithers through the labyrinth of her heart, trailing the sweet pastel pink ooze of pure and innocent love in its wake. This all-enveloping warmth cradling her very soul was an invasive presence, like an ethereal tumor ready to burst open at any moment and flood her body with its golden poison.

She doesn't want this kind of love. It's too sweet, to kind, too…normal. Most importantly, she doesn't want the love from the man who murdered _him_. Her dark darling, her shadow love, and enemy of her friends. The fox will never hold her heart because the crow has picked it clean. Oh yes, she shed tears when she thought Kurama dead; she's always been a great actress. Death has not cured her of her affinity for masks. Kurama is tempting, but Karasu was irresistible. A great, churning gout of ebon flame that beckoned her in the venomous voice of a siren, never letting up until, like a powder-blue moth, she flew straight into the blazing torrent. In flew an insect. Out crawled an arachnid, corrupt and hungry.

Indeed, she tries often to find some tiny spark, some wispy ghost of flame to prove to herself that she does hold some form of love for the fox, but there is nothing. It's cruel to cling to him, she knows, yet he is the closest she'll ever get to Karasu. The last physical token to remind her of his existence. When Kurama kisses her, gentle and chaste, she imagines Karasu's lips devouring her mouth with an animal hunger. When Kurama's soft fingers intertwine with hers like vines lacing through a trellis, Botan instead envisions Karasu's hands clamping down on hers, possessive and dominant.

This farce is a fitting punishment for him. The light conquered the darkness, so she shall poison the light. Feed it full of lies, allow it to glut itself on deceit until it collapses under the weight of its own bulk and the disease from her two-faced debauchery has taken full root within. Indeed, the perfect punishment for him…and her as well.

She always wants what she can't have.

She never shows her true face.

She is as rotten as those she helps to condemn.

And so Botan casts herself as the star in this distasteful, tacky melodrama. It's not love that keeps her bound to him, but her own greed that condemns her to Kurama. She is his prisoner and he her ignorant, unknowing warden. Her blasphemous desires are the chains and his affection for her is the lock.

Oh well, it doesn't matter. It's not the first time's she's sinned, nor will it be her last. Pretending to love another isn't the worst thing she'd done. Besides, Janus is a fitting role for her and she plays it oh so very well.

So let it all continue! No one will be the wiser, after all…

No one ever is.

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 **Uh…Stream of Conscious maybe? Really, I have no clue on this one… I just wanted to show Botan with a darker side. I apologize for how short this is.**


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